Pod and Ponder

Fall 2024: Forming Mature Critics of Technology

Pod and Ponder series logo with a microphone and multicolored soundwave background and titles of the podcasts listed in the following section.

Join the Pod and Ponder series to discuss with colleagues how to form students as mature critics of innovative technology. Together, we will reflect on podcasts featuring educators, technology critics, and digital humanists that call for purposeful and holistic responses to modern AI from various perspectives and philosophical commitments. Dive into lively discussions, develop practical classroom strategies, and help students grow as mature critics of the digital age! The conversations during this series will lead into CELT’s spring workshop sequence: Character Education in the Age of Automation.

Add Sessions to your Calendar

Sessions will be held over Zoom from 12:15pm – 1:00pm, and all staff and faculty are welcome. Join whichever session or sessions interest you by adding them to your calendar with the following links.

Episode Descriptions

41 Questions for Technologies We Use, and That Use Us (The Ezra Klein Show)

November 6th, 2024, 12:15 – 1:00 PM

We all know by now that Zoom causes fatigue, social media spreads misinformation and Google Maps is wiping out our sense of direction. We also know, of course, that Zoom allows us to cooperate across continents, that social media connects us to our families and Google Maps keeps us from being lost. A lot of technological criticism today is about weighing whether a technology is good or bad, or judging its various uses. But there’s an older tradition of criticism that asks a more fundamental and nuanced question: How do these technologies change the people who use them, both for good and for bad? And what do the people who use them — all of us, in other words — actually want? Do we even know? L.M. Sacasas explores these questions in his great newsletter, “The Convivial Society.” His work is marrying the theorists of the 20th century — Hannah Arendt, C.S. Lewis, Ivan Illich, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman and more — to the technologies of the present day. I’ve [the host, Ezra Klein] found this merging of past thinkers and contemporary concerns revelatory in an era when we tend to take the shape of our world for granted and forget how it would look to those who stood outside it, or how it looked to those who were there at the inception of these tools and mediums.

Beyond Boring Robots: Finding the Path to Flourishing in a Technological World (For Your Consideration)

November 13th, 2024, 12:15 – 1:00 PM

Every new advance in technology — this spring the headlines are about ChatGPT — is heralded as a magical new dawn in the human story. Yet more than one hundred years into the modern technological era, in spite of our unprecedented affluence and control over the natural world, we find a surprising amount of distress and dis-ease. As currently designed, technology will continue to both initially amaze us and ultimately disappoint us — delivering, at best, a world of more and more “boring robots.” But a different design is possible. This talk will explore how individuals, families, and communities — as well as professions, corporations, and nations — can pursue a better path.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (New Books Network)

November 20th, 2024, 12:15 – 1:00 PM

Why do we assume that computers always get it right? Today’s book is: Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (MIT Press, 2019), in which Professor Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally—hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners—that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work. Broussard, a software developer and journalist, reminds us that there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with technology. With this book, she offers a guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology—and issues a warning that we should never assume that computers always get things right. Making a case against technochauvinism—the belief that technology is always the solution—Broussard argues that it’s just not true that social problems would inevitably retreat before a digitally enabled Utopia. To prove her point, she undertakes a series of adventures in computer programming. She goes for an alarming ride in a driverless car, concluding “the cyborg future is not coming any time soon”; uses artificial intelligence to investigate why students can’t pass standardized tests; deploys machine learning to predict which passengers survived the Titanic disaster; and attempts to repair the U.S. campaign finance system by building AI software. If we understand the limits of what we can do with technology, Broussard tells us, we can make better choices about what we should do with it to make the world better for everyone.

The Promise and Peril of Generative AI (For Your Consideration)

November 25th, 2024, 12:15 – 1:00 PM

With ChatGPT, and AI more generally, very much in the news, director Michael Sacasas talked with Dr. Scott Hawley about recent trends in generative AI and its possible consequences across a variety of domains. Dr. Scott Hawley is Professor of Physics at Belmont University and Technical Fellow at Harmonai. He has worked extensively on machine learning in the field of audio engineering, and also writes on the intersection of ethics, faith, and AI.

Embodiment and AI (Centering Centers)

December 4th, 2024, 12:15 – 1:00 PM

For some, artificial intelligence represents the latest development in an age-old series of fantasies about escaping our vulnerable, imperfect, animal bodies. Humans have continuously developed tools to boost our capabilities; in the case of AI, we’re amplifying the speed of cognitive processes. But what capacities remain distinctively human? Dr. Susan Hrach is the author of the 2022 Silver Nautilus Award-winning book Minding Bodies: how physical space, sensation, and movement affect learning (WVU Press, 2021). As an undergraduate, she spent a year studying at the Universität Innsbruck, Austria, which shaped her lifelong interests in world literature, translation studies, and global education. Her international teaching experiences inform her on-going research and practice. In 2022-23 she served as Fulbright Canada Distinguished Research Chair in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Andy Crouch on AI, Algorithms, and Modern Sorcery (The Culture Translator)

December 11th, 2024, 12:15 – 1:00 PM

This episode interviews Andy Crouch, partner for theology and culture at Praxis, a venture-building ecosystem advancing redemptive entrepreneurship. His writing explores faith, culture, and the image of God in the domains of technology, power, leadership, and the arts. He is the author of five books, including most recently The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World.